ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.

I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.

That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.

Some subscriptions make sense for the consumer, or at least justifiable.

IMO a music service like Spotify is absolutely one of them.

Turning heated seats in a subscription? Burn in hell.

its not the subscription service that's bad its the implementation of the subscription services that suck and you 100% should pirate and adblock every piece of media you consume unless its directly profiting a small creator otherwise youre setting a precedent that 18 subscriptions should be required for me to follow a tv show.

pirating was dying down in popularity until this rise of the current shitty corporate media garbage. money is the only thing that matters on this god given earth do you really think your money is better off in a corporations mega stock with a super small portion actually being given to a creator?

and if you say more things in life matter than money then go on without money, youll be completely unable to enjoy anything. solely off the basis of youll starve because low and behold we've monetized eating and drinking. two fundamental requirements of survival.

welcome to earth where ur either bombed by powerful people or youre blackmailed by the cost of living (designated by powerful people) enjoy your stay (or die the world doesnt actually care they just want your money, and dying is pretty lucrative for funeral homes anyways)

The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.

Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn't only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It's the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.

Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there's a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.

I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it's cheaper/almost free, that's definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it's just super convenient.

This is a type of comment i hoped would die with reddit. They are fucking awful.